


City Lights

by dontbeeshy



Series: Premiers Baisers [2]
Category: SKAM (France)
Genre: First Kiss, I'm a sucker for happy endings, M/M, it gets angsty for like half a sec but don't worry it's all fluffy, lucas sounds dark and edgy, wrote this at 2am please give me credit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-06 09:27:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20289205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dontbeeshy/pseuds/dontbeeshy
Summary: Lucas decides to stay at Eliott's after the piano scene. Eliott's ditches Lucille. They end up on the balcony, trying to look for stars in the cold January night.





	City Lights

As he lit another cigarette, Eliott wondered if stars would light up the sky that night. In Paris, it wasn’t always the case. Clouds and pollution had their ways. But today, luck was on his side. He had caught the bus just a second before it left the station, he had nailed his exam, and most importantly, he had managed to bring Lucas to his place.This very Lucas who had played the piano so beautifully about an hour ago, somewhere between two Star Wars jokes. The same Lucas that was now sitting just centimetres away from him on the tiny Parisian balcony of Eliott’s living-room.

He saw Lucas eyeing his cigarette without a word, and he passed it to him.

“I don’t think we’re going to see the stars tonight.” Eliott declared. “It’s January anyway.”

“It’s alright.” Lucas replied in a cloud of smoke. “I find the lights of the city way more interesting anyway.”

“How come?”

“The stars are always the same. They’re up there, always forming the same constellations. Days pass, and night after night they are still here. Every night. Most people think it doesn’t get any prettier than that, but what’s so pretty in predictability?”

“And the lights of the city are unpredictable?”

“Of course they are! That’s what makes them interesting. They tell stories.” He offered the cigarette back to Eliott. “You see that building over there?” Lucas pointed at a high modern structure that was standing out in the sea of hausmannian houses. It was close enough to Eliott’s flat for him to see the lights but too far away to distinguish anything else.

“What about it?”

“There are nine windows lit up.”

Eliott stared at Lucas, confused. “What’s your point?”

Lucas smirked. “Well, there are nine potential stories happening right there between all those silhouettes.” He took a quick drag of the cigarette right from Eliott’s hands. “Look, fifth floor. Four people around a table, right?” Eliott nodded. “There are two couples dining at the table. But little does the host of the night, the man on the right, know that his wife is cheating on him with the man sitting in front of him. When she’ll go to the kitchen to clean the dishes, he will sneak into the room to make out with her, knowing very well that her husband is only a few meters away. He likes the thrill of it."

“How do you know all of this?” Eliott frowned.

“I don’t. That’s the whole point.” Lucas answered playfully. “Your turn now, pick a window!”

Eliott thought it was stupid at first, but Lucas seemed so hyped about that game that he couldn’t resist. So he carefully analysed all the windows, his eyes going from one floor to another, until an old lady sitting alone in front of her window caught his attention.

“Eighth floor.” he announced. “She’s been alone in this apartment for as long as she can remember. To her it feels like years, but in fact it’s only been a few months since her husband died. She wonders when her son is going to visit her. Now that he lives abroad, he comes less and less often. It’s a big and empty flat, she thinks. At least she still has her cat.”

And suddenly she’s not a shadow anymore. She’s someone with a past, a present and a future. She is a literal book full of stories, an entire universe contained in forty square meters.

“You’re good at this” Lucas whispered.

“Do you do that often?”

Lucas sighed. “I used to, with my mother. She would bring me to the café at the street corner and we would sit outside. She would order a lemonade for me and a glass of wine for her and we would reinvent the life of the people passing by.” He looked down at the streetlights. “Then I grew up and she grew sick and we stopped going.”

Eliott knew the standard _‘I’m sorry_’ would sound stupid, so he settled for “Well, if you ever feel the need to reinvent lives, i have plenty of neighbours.”

The other boy laughed and little tears formed at the corners of his eyes. They glistened like the moon. “Then don’t be surprised if I randomly show up at two AM every night because I can’t sleep and need to project my problems onto strangers.”

_The door would be open for you_, Eliott thought. He wondered if, up there, people could see him and Lucas. Two boys, sharing a cigarette on a balcony on a cold January night. He wondered if people down on the sidewalk could see them too, see the faint light of the cigarette growing weaker and weaker as it was reaching the filter and yet being revived at the slightest touch of a lip. At least the stars couldn’t see them. But maybe if they did, they’d approuve.

“What do you think people see when they look at our window?” He asked Lucas.

The younger boy looked at the thin veil of gray clouds hiding the black sky and spoke slowly. “I think they see those two guys and their cigarette and they’re wondering what they are to each other. They settle on friends, because it’s the answer that makes the most sense. They wonder how they met and what brought them to this balcony. There is no way they can figure out that both of them cancelled their plans just to enjoy the company of the other. They don’t know that one of them is supposed to be at a party with his friends and will pretend to have been home taking care of his mother. They don’t know that the other one is supposed to be doing something somewhere with someone who keeps texting their phone since he said he couldn’t come. Or maybe he was honest and said he didn’t want to come. They’re probably thinking that those two guys on the balcony had planned this evening, ditched their girlfriends for a night to play fifa and drink beers. That they are childhood friends, not strangers who met just a few days ago. That this evening is something of an habit. That this evening won’t change anything in their lives.”

The cigarette died between his fingers.

“To sum it up, they are wrong about everything. Because the easiest answers are never the right ones. This game is always a losing one.”

Eliott looks up. On the eighth floor of the apartment building, a new light is on. An old man is getting into bed, quickly followed by the old lady. A dog is quietly sleeping on a carpet nearby. On the fifth floor, the two women are making out on the couch and the two men are nowhere to be seen, probably gone back to their own place.

“You’re surprising.” Eliot mutters.

“And let me guess, you like surprising people?” Lucas looks right at him, his eyes darkened by the night sky and his nose reddened by the cold. He looks tiny and vulnerable, hugging his knees against his chest and shivering slightly. Yet, he looks brave. He dares things, like staring lustfully at Eliott’s lips while slightly parting his own. He isn’t dumb, he must have understood that it’s a girl who has tried to reach Eliott all night long. But he is still here; testing the waters, ready to dive right into it once the city lights are all out.

“I do.” And Lucas is by far the most surprising person he has ever met.

The lights in the living-room stay on all evening as they kiss on the balcony. The lights in the kitchen go on and off, when Lucas goes to get more beer or when Eliott decides that three in the morning is the perfect time to bake cookies for Lucas. The lights in the bedroom are never lit that night, as the two boys fall asleep tangled on the couch. And when the lights in Eliott’s apartment finally go down, the neighbours will know that they were wrong and the stars will be laughing at them.

**Author's Note:**

> wrote this in the middle of the night, i hope it's not too bad.  
thank you for reading, don't forget to leave a kudo <3  
also stay hydrated!


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